An executive assistant is required to carry out a variety of responsibilities. To fulfill each duty successfully, you need to manage yourself, others and the various tasks assigned to you. Management and organizing skills are, therefore, a must for retaining clarity, handling conversations, receiving and storing new information, retrieving old information, and fulfilling commitments.

1. Prioritizing

Before organizing comes prioritizing. Before you choose certain spaces for the storing of particular documents, such as creating electronic folders for storing files, you need to categorize them according to importance.

Prioritizing will help you to create categories (Urgent, Important, Less Important, Frequent, Yearly) under which you can keep different files. Be it electronically shared information or information on paper, create a system based on priority. It will help you to keep the stored information neatly classified.

2. Organizing Work

Even though putting a paper in its designated folder takes up a little more time than putting it into the top drawer, retrieving that piece of paper from among a hundred others will take up a lot of time. As an executive assistant frequently needs to retrieve information, a disorganized workplace can mean chaos and lack of efficiency.

An executive assistant must create a specific system of organizing for different platforms. For example, for organizing emails, you may create different folders to categorize emails, and you use software to manage messages.

Technology can make organizing immensely easy, but you will need to create and update that system to keep information organized and easily available for retrieval.

An organized workspace is one where you have a mind map of the things you may need in the near future. If you are spending time to recall where you had kept a file (electronic or physical), you need to work on organizing. When you have specific spaces for specific things, and you have stuck to that system of organizing for a long time, your mind will automatically create a map of it. You will then not need to spend a second in remembering where you kept what.

4. Communicating

Some jobs require communication skills more than others. For an administrative or executive assistant, having excellent communication skills is vital. Whether it is communicating with the boss, with the company clients, customers, suppliers, partners, employees, or with the senior management of the company, you need to know what to say, how to say it and when to say it.

As an executive assistant represents a company to many people, effective communication is a must to build the professional image of the company.

5. Managing Yourself

There will always be difficult times, situations that worry you or cause damage. Expecting them and preparing them will help you to handle them successfully, and reduce their negative impact on you and others.

Developing confidence, the ability to handle difficult people and situations, managing stress, and creating a healthy balance between work and life will make your journey as an executive assistant pleasurable and productive.

These basic and immensely important skills learned and practiced by an administrative and executive assistants can quickly make them gain expertise in their job.

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